Making of: Game of Thrones Dragon Puppet Update 3

So with making any project, sometimes it just gets to a point where starting over instead of continuing on is just a better way to go. I was lucky enough to get some awesome advice from Don Lanning  who instructed and helped me build a much better armature for this Games of Thrones dragon puppet.

Don is seriously awesome. I had already watched a lot of his instructional videos via the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, but getting to ask him questions in person was super informative and helpful.

Anyway so here’s the original sculpt

And here’s what it turned in to,

As you can see the new armature is fairly larger than the original sculpt. The key to a good armature is support security. My initial intention was to tie down the the dragons feet of the original sculpt. I made a rig for it but in the end it was still entirely too wobbly. I had suspected this would happen initially, but thought I might be able to get away with it…

The answer to that inquiry was NO.

Lesson learned, won’t make that mistake again.

So now, everything is held up by a middle pipe and the wire armature is secured via a large chunk of propoxy 20, definitely no going anywhere now.

So after making sure the armature was secure and adding some legs I started adding clay to the body and head.

I still need to make some wire rigs for the wings but he’s coming along nicely. Stay turned for more updates soon!

Check out Game of Thrones Dragon Update 1 or Game of Thrones Dragon Update 2 if you haven’t seen them yet!